About two years ago, around this time, my then girlfriend sent me a text message that I didn’t want to see. First, it was a surprise to get a text from her because she didn’t have texting on her phone, so it obviously came from someone else’s cell. The words I didn’t want to see: “We should probably break up”. Something like that, I don’t remember it verbatim, but that’s not the point of my story. The point is that she couldn’t break up with me face-to-face or even with a phone call, she did it with a text message, from her friend’s phone. All I kept thinking from then on was how cheap, childish, and cowardly this was. But, one of my co-workers actually made me think about this tonight. He didn’t bring up the subject in any way, shape, or form, it’s just I really hate him. I’m in the situation myself.

My co-worker, let’s call him “Bill”, is a divorced, 60 year-old military veteran, who wears his gray hair long, wears a goatee, and is about 125 lbs. soaking wet. To say the least, he has a massive chip on his shoulder. But, to top it all off, he is a MASSIVE hypochondriac. His conversations with me and with everyone at work involve the negative sides of life which include: high gas prices, crappy weather, his “horrible” health problems, the state of the nation, Barack Obama eventually getting assassinated, and the world literally ending. So, I try my very best to avoid him, at all costs. I work in areas where he isn’t or if I can’t do that, I give one word answers to his questions (not hard because he justs asks yes or no questions, thank God). Eventually I can’t handle the stupid questions I always have to answer and being so annoyed, I will give smart remarks that he will be offended by (not hard to do because any answer that isn’t a yes or a no will send him flying off the handle). I compare him to a character that was featured in the Sam Jackson episode of the TV show Extras.

It’s the bald guy

There’s a scene in the episode where Andy(Ricky Gervais) is talking with his friend Maggie and he doesn’t want to talk with the bald guy anymore so she tells Andy just to tell him to bugger off, but Andy can’t do that. He can’t do that because “it would be like saying that you have something fundamentally against his personality”, and that would be wrong to say that to someone’s face, even if it was in an underhanded, coded manner. This is my opinion of my co-worker, “Bill”. I genuinely have something against his personality, fundamentally. He is not funny, he’s sad and pathetic, and at the very least, can’t have a good conversation with a person. But, with the way he is (socially inept), he has no problem telling me his perceptions of the way that I am, out of the blue letting me know that “I’m not a very friendly person”. I wonder why, you dumb twat.

What does this have to do with my dumb ex-girlfriend breaking up with me through a text message? After all, I don’t have anything emotionally invested in a co-worker, like I would with a girlfriend, so what does it matter? Quoting The Office, UK Version:

Tim: The people you work with are just people you were thrown together with. Y’know, you don’t know them, it wasn’t your choice. And yet you spend more time with them than you do your friends or your family.

Well, I started thinking about telling “Bill” off. I started to think how I could tell him how nobody likes him, how he’s a sad little man who needs to figure out that there’s more to life than griping about things, and how he needs to figure out how to talk to people in a way that doesn’t drive them insane. But, because I’m not socially inept, I compared this to another situation, like a break-up. During a break-up, one would find out all the crappy things that are wrong with them, but at it’s core, one would find out that there is something that the other person fundamentally doesn’t like about your personality (most of the time). I then thought about how hard that would’ve been for me to hear when my girlfriend broke up with me. I started to think that maybe she knew that I might react harshly to such a conversation and she wanted to spare me.

This is one of the reasons why I would tell this guy off. I basically have to bite my tongue with these thoughts because if I verbalized them to my co-worker, it would cause more harm then good. It would feel good to get it off my chest, but I’d have to see him the next day. The other reason I couldn’t tell him because working in such close quarters this just wouldn’t be beneficial to me to have such a poisonous atmosphere surrounding not just me and him, but everyone. So, all I have to vent is my other co-workers (who hate him just as much) and this blog.

I kind of understand why she did what she did, breaking up with me through a text message. Kind of. I mean, I do think I would’ve reacted in a bad way to it, I was going through a lot of crap that I couldn’t control. Then I think back to that time, how I was going through a lot of crap that I couldn’t control, how I needed her more than ever. She could’ve at least let me know if we could work it out, with a face-to-face conversation. What a damn bitch.